Paul Olstad

EVault - Director of Web Services
Currently I'm with EVault helping them on their journey in the cloud. I'm leading a group of rock stars that are transforming the backup world by developing and delivering a world class SaaS site for cloud connected backup and recovery services.

HTML5 - Geolocation
I've been playing around with HTML5 recently. There's some pretty cool stuff around video, canvas and SVG that can be accomplished using HTML5. But other aspects like "geolocation" are very interesting. It's really a very simple way with javascript to determine somebody's latitude and longitude in the world. If the device has native GPS support built in already - like the Android or iPhone, it uses the native GPS data. Otherwise it uses IP address based geolocation. Very cool stuff - check out a basic Geolocation Demo I did using a Google Maps.

Director of Web/SaaS Development
A few years back I was the Director of the SaaS Team at Shavlik Technologies. I started with only a few people and built a world-class team consisting of web developers, software engineers, database administrators and UI designers! We truly accomplished remarkable things at Shavlik. In fact, so remarkable that VMWare acquired Shavlik Technologies as a result! My team was responsible for bringing to market several SaaS sites and key partnerships with companies like VMware to further Shavlik's leadership in the IT Management space and increase revenue for the company! In an interview with VMWorld TV in Europe, I discuss one of the SaaS web sites developed by my team.

Wall Street Journal Digital Network - Engineering Manager
In my last position at the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, I managed the Software Engineering Department for http://www.marketwatch.com. MarketWatch is a high traffic website with more than 15 Million page views per day. In the few years that I was leading MarketWatch Engineering, we were able to turn around a failing architecture and implement new engineering processes and development techniques that made marketwatch.com what it is today.

Long History of Web Experience
Before my most recent positions I spent 8 years with Park Nicollet Health Services and 11 years at Honeywell. At Park Nicollet I managed the Web Development team and focused on http://www.parknicollet.com. I was also responsible for the development of all custom Intranet and Internet applications, sites, web server administration and web hosting services. I did a huge amount of "hands-on" web development using Coldfusion, JavaScript, AJAX with an Oracle back end. I developed dozens of web applications such as E-Commerce, Surgery Apps, Health Coaching and others. At Honeywell I worked with CAE automation and web development in the Electrical Engineering department. Most of my work with Honeywell was done on UNIX systems such as Solaris and HP-UX.

The Next Generation of the Internet
I dug up this old blog post that I had several years ago. Actually, it was a series of articles I wrote for the Park Nicollet I.T. Communicator Newsletter and I decided to concatenate them and create a single blog post. While I consider much of it passé now, the concepts still hold true making it an interesting post. I hope some of it resonates with you. More...

My Blog
I'm very interested in web technologies, AJAX, social networking and music. My blog is dedicated to this and has several related posts that you might be interested in. Take a look at - http://paulolstad.blogspot.com to read more.